Extinct

“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”  – Madame de Stael

Rose felt the trembling tingle of a sleepless night. She stared at the full moon outside her window on Charles Street in New Orleans as thoughts of her lost lover slipped through her fingers. Beams of blue flickered through her window pane and caressed her face exposing the brown stains under her eyes; etched there forever by her rusty tears. Palmetto bugs danced all around the flames of the many scented candles she’d lit before she lay upon her futon to contemplate her lost lover.  She wondered how that same pale blue moon could shine down in his eyes all those thousands of miles away.

She dreamed that she was sleeping and in that sleep dreamt how every minute of pure ecstasy she’d had with her lovers in her cathedral bed had brought 1,000 hours of torment when the alliances inevitably spun apart. The planet rotated, the glaciers melted and without trying or practicing or even knowing it could be done, just by thinking it, she suffocated her want, sure that like the morphine that rose like a flood, pounding in her blood, the rapture she felt from her beloved was not worth the sickness that came when they always, inevitably, left her lost and empty.

So, when the next passion arrived and the dance began anew, slowly moving them toward each other like a magnet, she surrendered to the pull. Yet, when finally they were inches apart and the game was surely afoot, she felt nothing but the bottomless abyss, completely desolate. Her desire once so omniscient, the thing which gave her life meaning, evaporated into a whiff of smoke, and she with it went.